Customer Reviews

The Unknown Terrorist: A Novel

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Richard Flanagan's new novel (released in Australia in December 2006) is about terrorism. Not the kind that involves suicide bombings and religious fervour; the kind that involves mass paranoia and the abuse of power. The second kind is the more insidious.

The unknown terrorist of the title is Gina Davies, a young woman from the suburbs, pretty much alone in the world and focused entirely on achieving material dreams. She's a stripper and pole dancer, a pill-popper and, on the whole, rather a shallow person. Not the kind of character you'd normally feel for as a reader. Yet Flanagan succeeds in making us sympathise with her completely, to feel outrage and pity for the monumental injustice she suffers at the hands of the authorities, the media and the society she inhabits.

A chance encounter and a one-night stand with a suspected terrorist (who, as it turns out, probably isn't a terrorist after all) transforms the rather naive Gina into public enemy number one. Frightened, confused and mistrustful of authority, she becomes a fugitive. Fuelled by hysterical media coverage, Gina is hunted down as a dangerous home-grown terrorist. The ending is not happy.

Certainly, The Unknown Terrorist is emotionally gripping. As we follow Gina's mental and physical unravelling, it's very hard to remain detached. It's hard because it's all so absurd. Surely no sane society could put two and two together and get five in such a disastrous, unjust way.

Of course, it's a highly political novel, and as such, its purpose is to arouse, to question, to jolt. It succeeds handsomely in this regard. It's also guilty of being melodramatic at times, and some strands of the storyline are a little too contrived. However, judging a political novel purely on its technical merit would be to miss the point completely. Flanagan has set out to make a powerful statement and has succeeded.

I hope lots of people read it and talk about it. I hope someone makes a film of it. It's not an uplifting book by any means - it's pessimistic and downright depressing, in fact. But it's an important book for our times, such as they are.

Auden told us that "we must love one another or die." Like a zealous D.A ,Flanagan hammers away on this theme, arguing that we have failed on the first and are now reaping the second. There is no brief for the defense. He drapes his argument on the narrative of the Doll, a stripper whose one night of pleasure with a supposed terrorist leads the cops and the media to treat her as one. An innocent caught up with larger events, bigger trends---the constant fear triggered by 9-11, the maw of the media, ever needing to be fed.
The best parts: Flanagan nails the inner life of a lap dancer and her clients; is pitch perfect on how the media ,on few facts, creates a story, with experts twisting facts to suit the story(the writing of the Big Show on the Doll revealed is savage in its accuracy); illuminates the lies that governments tell for no better reason to keep power for power's sake; is dead on in his erotic descriptions of sex and of stripping.
The worst parts: he introduces a police character late in the novel for no reason other than to show how easy a choice it is to forgo doing the right thing when all the rewards are elsewhere; he plops all sorts of ideas in the book---overwhelming it---we live in a consumer driven society(the Doll loves to shop and read design zines), the government is just not to be trusted but is evil enough to manufacture false terrorist threats,etc; and, worst of all, takes the lazy way out of any narrative jam with unlikely coincidences.
Why a 4? For all its flaws, he writes about things that matter a lot and matter now. He is a truth teller. We need as many as we can get.

Never having read anything by Richard Flanagan, I picked this up on the strength of the very positive reviews printed on the cover of the paperback edition. What a disappointment! It reads like a slightly elaborated outline for a book. There is much moralizing and a whole lot of bad writing. The characters are poorly developed and one dimensional. Entire sections read like notes a screenwriter might write advising an actor how he should play his character and what his character's motivations are. The prose is awkward and unconvincing. There are pages and pages of "sly" and "ironic" observations with little connection to the characters. In short, the author tells us what we are supposed to think rather than letting us discover these things through the characters' actions and words.

I am sympathetic to the theme of the novel, which is the absurdity of Bush's endless "war on terrorism," and the State's eagerness to compromise basic civil liberties in its hunt for the bad guys. Unfortunately, Flanagan doesn't make me care about the characters.

The Jacket compares Flanagan's effort to le Carre, but a more appropriate comparison is to the most middling of graphic novelists.

Don't waste your time with this drivel.

This book is ambitious in that it is a thriller where most of the action occurs inside the unappealing central character's mind. That mind turns out to be little more than a cipher that the author, Flanagan, uses to wax exhaustively on the decay at the core of contemporary Australian values and American values by proxy one could argue. There are some bright points; the drug squad cop, Athens Loukakis' sub story about his crumbling marriage was handled with a depth that made this minor character interesting. Also a well executed sex scene between the Doll and Tariq on which the main plot of the book turns excuses the inflated Christ/Nietzsche as dreamers pap. However, the book does not work as a thriller because to be thrilling the plot turns have to be equal parts believable and shocking not just shocking. The book tries unsuccessfully to build some vague sense of dread at what could happen in an extreme case of mistaken identity but how is this possible with such an unsympathetic character as the Doll? It might have worked better as a summer blockbuster by cropping out the more believable bits which are used here as just a setup for the next implausible plot turn or internal monologue.

In Richard Flanagan's first three novels, his prose stood out for its silky smooth invisibility; combining a stunning richness with well paced characterisation and fiction that transcended its form. He's a writer unafraid to delve deeply into the silent beauty and horror deep in the heart of all of us. But his latest novel, The Unknown Terrorist, is a perfect example of why polemics and fiction don't work well together. Dedicated to Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks, the book struggles with the fictional voice from the first page, and this fuzziness between the polemics of its political message (Richard the writer with something to say) and the integrity of the novel's own story (the fictional narrator) is one which continues throughout the novel, and, in the end, undermines it's fictional power. It might have helped the novel a little to eliminate the opening chapter, which sets a confusing and unpleasant tone to the book. In a voice entirely different from the main narration, the opening tells us a story about Nietzsche and Jesus; the failure of love, and the danger of dreaming: "Nietzsche wrote, "I am not a man, I am dynamite". It was the image of a dreamer. Every day now somebody somewhere is dynamite. They are not an image. They are the walking dead, and so are the people who are standing round them. Reality was never made by realists, but by dreamers like Jesus and Nietzche." (2)

Although the voice is confident of the truth that it is conveying, it is completely incomprehensible. Is this passage supposed to be referring to suicide bombers? How do they create reality? Are these qualities being lauded? Is Hicks being likened to a Jesus or Nietzche? The notion that "love is not enough" is a leitmotif repeated fairly often throughout the book and mirrored identically between page 1 and page 96. The repetition doesn't help make sense of the sentence however. Love is not enough for what? To save our lives from being meaningless? To save us from the corrupt, ugly people that we are? To overcome our inherent faults as human beings?

Once into the novel we are presented with four days in the life of the Doll, a twenty-six year old pole dancer, who is wrongfully accused of being a terrorist after a one night stand with another wrongfully accused man. Although it's a little murky, one can imagine that the "love" which the narrator keeps referring to, is that moment between the Doll and Tariq, the lover she meets after he saves her friends child on Bondi and then conveniently re-meets during the Mardi-Gras. It's a fairly flimsy consummation to build the book on and I imagine that this kind of love wouldn't be up to much at all. As a character, the Doll doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. The narrator keeps her, and everyone else, at a kind of cinematic arm's length, so we never really appreciate her beyond the roundness of her body, her old fashioned face, or the stereotypes out of which she is constructed.

For a novel to work there must at least be some kind of tension between positive and negative characters, but there really are no appealing characters in this novel. Even Wilder, the Doll's one "true" friend, fails her in the end, proving herself to be as empty as everyone else.

It would probably be easier to dismiss this work if Flanagan weren't so talented at constructing sentences. There are times when his writing is as delicate and beautiful as poetry as this description of the end of a marriage.

But in the end, pretty passages are simply not enough to save this poorly plotted and poorly characterised tale. The book is full of clichés and stereotypes as brutal as those Flanagan criticises. The poll dancers who talk about the Doll are all utterly vacuous. The bad guys, Lee Moon, Frank Moretti, the anchorman Richard Cody, or the wealthy people at Katie Moretti's party are all characters with no depth or dimension to render them realistic. Sydney itself is seen as a kind of game park with grungy areas like Kings Cross, suburbian areas like the West, or wealthy areas like Double Bay all fulfilling their stereotypical functions.

The Doll herself is little more than a vehicle for the message this book seeks to promote--that our governments are corrupt; that we're all vacuous and grasping, that life is more or less meaningless, and that we'd all sell out our best friends for a few less wrinkles, a promotion or a few more hours of oblivion into the media that keeps us quiet. The voice that seems to resonate in the Doll's head is so obviously not hers, and so intent on passing on its message of emptiness that it destroys any kind of fictive dream for the reader.

Who are these people? As Flanagan himself has shown so beautifully in his first three novels, the world is much bigger, and people so much richer and more complex than the screenbites we get from television. The narrator is so sure of himself, and his generalisations so sweeping that they create their own damage. The polemics, which provide a one sided indictment without alternative, are transparent and unpleasant, involving such overt television style symbolism as covering a body in money, or slashing art to prove how useless it is against greed. The Unknown Terrorist is being sold as a Trojan Horse of a thriller masquerading the seriousness of the societal critique it provides, but even that statement is a Trojan Horse. At the core of this novel is a nihilism so bleak-- "F*uck you all!" (312)--that it makes even the horror of the terrorist act, of murder and suicide, seem minor in comparison. It's almost the complete opposite of the joyous affirmative humour which undermines Gould's Book of Fish, and except for the occasional forays into a beautifully rendered prose, it's hard to believe this is the same author.

Magdalena Ball is the author of Sleep Before Evening.

This blaring novel is interesting enough to finish, but be prepared to groan "oh, come ON" more than once. In it you will learn that Australia (and by association, the west) is materialistic, that there are sleazy television journalists, and that people go crazy with fear when a perceived terrorist attack occurs. Surprised by any of this? Didn't think so.

The main character, known as The Doll, is a pole dancer is a Sydney club. There is not any particular reason for this to be her profession, except to show the lack of moral grounding and give author Flanagan the chance to talk about her anatomy. The Doll is working at this bar to save money to buy a really nice apartment, which she will furnish with name-brand items. She meets a nice man named Tariq, has really hot sex with him, and discovers the next day that he--and by extension, she--is under suspicion for a series of explosions in Sydney. The Doll goes on The Run, and not being terribly smart or imaginative, has a hard time of it. You're sorry when she makes her final decision and takes action because you really wish she'd get some sort of break, but of course she won't. She's a stripper from a broken home is a crappy suburb who takes up with guys named Tariq. She is out of luck.

There must be some reason why the events of this novel are handled with all the subtlety of a smack on the chops with a wet mackerel. Flanagan has a reputation as a literary novelist; is he considering a genre change? Recommended for readers who are tired of nuance and aching for a tale as blatant as AM talk radio.

The non-stop satircal gut punches at Faux News were terrific. I loved the hysterical forfeiture of reason and skepticism in the face of TERROR. This was all spot-on and made the book worth reading. The notion that a stripper would be suspected of terrorist ties was really interesting but Gina is so unbelievably vacuous that it distracted me. I just never got to caring or feeling sorry for her. Oh well, there was enough hear to be entertained by and think about. I'd give Flanagan's next work at least a peek.

The Unknown Terrorist: A Novel
This novel is about a pole dancer who inadvertently gets caught up as an alleged conspirator in an Australian terrorism scare. Flanagan paints a vivid picture of the Sydney underworld and along the way he skewers television news, status-seeking consumption, and other elements of contemporary Australian life that seem to replicate much of what is degenerate from America. Some readers will be drawn to the suspense-thriller aspects of it, and others perhaps to the incisive social commentary. Either way, it works. One criticism: there were too many implausible coincidences in the overlap of characters in the plot.

Although it is very different in tone and style and subject matter, my experience reading this book reminded me a little of how I recently felt reading "An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England". The narrator of that book did one stupid thing after another and the reader was supposed to accept these actions as reasonable because the character is described/definned as a bumbler. In real life of course people do not fall quite so neatly into such categories. Someone may bumble most of the time in certain areas but navigate smoothly through other sets of circumstances. As Chris Rock noted in one of his comedy routines when describing his political leanings - "I have some things that I'm conservative about, and some things that I'm liberal about". Nobody is always liberal or always conservative or always a bumbler, though it is true that some people act a certain way far more often than not. The "title" character of The Unknown Terrorist is a fairly complex one with a well fleshed out background, and the storyline is fueled by much bigger ideas than the comical Arsonist book. But I couldn't shake the feeling as I sped through its pages that the actions of pivotal characters were specifically intended to promote strong opinions held by the author and nothing but. He wanted to make certain points about politics and the media and about how easily the sheep like masses can be led to a prefabricated conclusion. If at any point one of the major characters in this reasonably but not overwhelmingly well written book behaved in a way that I personally believe would have been more realistic reactions/responses, the book would completely fall apart because little else was holding it in place. The wrongfully accused woman needs to be so paranoid from the get go (her drug use helped in this regard, I suppose) and distrustful of authority that the only thing she can think to do is run and hide even before she's really being chased. The decision makers in the media need to be so obsessed about breaking a big story that not only does truth become irrelevant, but so does having supporting evidence of any kind. The author is OBVIOUSLY cynical about our post 9/11 world, and anyone who does not have their head shoved deeply in the sand can recognize why this might be so, but I found myself torn between wanting to follow the storyline to where it was blatantly leading and wanting the characters to break free of the author's plot machinations and act in a common sense manner that would likely clear matters up within a few pages of text. Despite such frustration with plausibility, this was definitely a gripping and smooth flowing read.

I was looking forward to reading this book based on the reviews I'd read and the reputation of the award winning author. It was too unbelievable and steeped in paranoia for my tastes. Flanagan develops his main character, the Doll, as a somewhat uninformed and rather dull stripper whose following some ill defined plan to create a new life for herself. She gets caught in the crossfire of a TV "journalist"(trying to hang on to his fame and fortune) and the government (trying to keep the public scared in order to stay in power) in their efforts to find a terrorist cell. The Doll is transformed in a matter of days into a cynical, disillusioned and yet somehow enlightened creature. The way the characters are all interconnected, you'd think Sydney was the size of Peyton Place. It didn't work for me and I felt more depressed for slogging through the book than I did for the unsatisfying ending. Still, I think Flanagan is a good writer and I plan to give his other books a look.